Lie to Me: Fiction in the Post-Truth Era

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Charles Van Doren as a contestant on the midcentury television quiz show “Twenty-One.”

CreditCreditBettmann, via Getty Images

By Adam Kirsch

Jan. 15, 2017

American novelists have long complained about the ability of real life to outstrip fiction. In his landmark 1961 essay “Writing American Fiction,” Philip Roth observed that “actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.” The figure Roth cites is Charles Van Doren, of quiz-show scandal fame; but place Mr. Van Doren next to Donald J. Trump, and you can measure the change in the nature of credibility over the past half-century.

Mr. Van Doren was disgraced when it was revealed that he had been given the answers to the questions on the game show “Twenty-One,” a contest that television viewers believed was real, not staged. Today an entire flourishing genre of television goes by the name “reality,” yet no one who watches it thinks it is genuinely real — that is, unplanned and unedited. Artificiality is what makes reality television enjoyable, even though these same shows, if advertised as fiction, would appear banal, repetitive and undramatic. Reality is the ingredient that turns a bad fiction into an enthralling one.

This dynamic is part of the novel’s origins. The earliest English novels, from “Moll Flanders” (1722) to “Clarissa” (1748), were published anonymously, with titles that implied they were true stories. It took generations to establish the conventions of fiction sufficiently to allow readers to take pleasure in novels that were explicitly untrue. The suspension of disbelief that fiction involves is a late stage in the evolution of taste, and it may prove to have been a temporary one.

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CreditPatricia Wall/The New York Times

The rise of the memoir over the past few decades doesn’t mean that readers are ready to abandon the techniques of fiction; but, like readers three centuries ago, they want the freedom of fiction along with consequentiality of fact.

The author David Shields diagnosed this desire in his 2010 manifesto “Reality Hunger”: “I find it very nearly impossible to read a contemporary novel that presents itself un-self-consciously as a novel.” Many fiction writers share this intuition, though they respond to it in different ways.

An alternative approach is to make fiction as close to fact as possible, by reducing its scope to the one subject on which each writer is an unchallengeable authority: himself or herself. Ben Lerner’s “10:04,”Tao Lin’s “Taipei” and Sheila Heti’s “How Should a Person Be?” all seek to convince us that we are reading about the writer’s actual life. These writers are engaged in a sophisticated project, in which the line between truth and fiction becomes harder and harder to make out.

But this game has a built-in fail-safe: Label a book “fiction,” and all is forgiven. A fiction can never be accused of being a lie.

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The author Philip Roth in 1964. “Actuality is continually outdoing our talents,” he wrote in an essay three years earlier, referring to fiction writers.CreditSam Falk/The New York Times

The problem is that, more and more, people seem to want to be lied to. This is the flip side of “reality hunger,” since a lie, like a fake memoir, is a fiction that does not admit its fictionality. That is why the lie is so seductive: It allows the liar and his audience to cooperate in changing the nature of reality itself, in a way that can appear almost magical. “Magical thinking” is used as an insult, but it is perhaps the most primal kind of thinking there is. The problem for modern people is that we can no longer perform this magic naively, with an undoubting faith in the reality of our inventions. We lie to ourselves now with a bad conscience. When the memoir is exposed as not having “really” happened, we want our money back.

Fiction was one solution to this quandary, allowing us to suspend disbelief in the way that Coleridge said was essential for literature. But the postmodern solution is even more powerful: It is the simple shamelessness that allows us to recognize a lie as a lie but still treat it as if it were a reality. Reality shows are a trivial example of this technique, but when it comes to politics the same process can have deadly results. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was published, like “Moll Flanders,” with no name on the title page; it, too, claimed to be a true account of real events — in this case, a meeting at which Jews plotted to take over the world and destroy civilization. Perhaps some of its readers, when it first appeared around 1903 and even today, sincerely believed that this was a real document.

But the “Protocols” is even more powerful when endorsed by people who know it is false, because such an act turns fact itself into an irrelevance. People who can turn a lie into a truth have the power to shape reality; they are poets of the real. And the audience that gives them its willing suspension of disbelief is a co-conspirator in this uncanny transformation, just as novel readers conspire in their enchantment. The bond between demagogues and their audience is cemented by their exhilarating consciousness of shared culpability.

The problem with our “post-truth” politics is that a large share of the population has moved beyond true and false. They thrill precisely to the falsehood of a statement, because it shows that the speaker has the power to reshape reality in line with their own fantasies of self-righteous beleaguerment. To call novelists liars is naïve, because it mistakes their intention; they never wanted to be believed in the first place. The same is true of demagogues.

From its beginning, the novel has tested the distinction between truth, fiction and lie; now the collapse of those distinctions has given us the age of Trump. We are entering a period in which the very idea of literature may come to seem a luxury, a distraction from political struggle. But the opposite is true: No matter how irrelevant hardheaded people may believe it to be, literature continually proves itself a sensitive instrument, a leading indicator of changes that will manifest themselves in society and culture. Today as always, the imagination is our best guide to what reality has in store.

Adam Kirsch is the author of the forthcoming book “The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C2 of the New York edition with the headline: Lie to Me: Fiction in the Post-Truth Era. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe